Tumbling PC prices stoke buy fever

By Staff Writer for Gartner

Johannesburg, 21 Jul 2008

Tumbling PC prices, resulting from the ongoing global economic uncertainty, has fuelled something of a boom in sales in the US and the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) regions, says a new Gartner report.

Preliminary results from the IT research house show 23.1 million PCs were shipped in the EMEA region in the second quarter of 2008, "a 23.5% increase from the same period in 2007".

In addition, EMEA exhibited the strongest year-over-year increase, fuelling the worldwide growth. Gartner could not immediately provide an Africa breakdown.

"The PC market in EMEA has beaten off the economic anguish. We have only ever seen the PC market exhibit growth above 20% once before in the past five years," says Ranjit Atwal, principal analyst for Gartner's client computing markets group in EMEA.

"However, the strong performance was mainly driven by declining average selling prices, which will impact revenues, margins and ultimately drive more consolidation," he adds.

The mobile PC market continued to exhibit strong growth with demand for notebooks reaching more than 40%, but the desk-based market showed stronger increase than expected, which was primarily fuelled by the price drop.

Atwal says Asus made its debut in the top five vendor rankings in EMEA for the first time this past quarter.

"Asus gained the number five spot to the detriment of FSC, which had another weak quarter," he says.

"Asus grew organically and expanded its presence across EMEA as a result of strong mini-notebook sales, which represented 5% of the mobile PC market shipments. Asus's entry in the EMEA PC market is testament to the growing penetration of Asia Pacific vendors in Europe," adds Atwal.

Acer posted a strong quarter by performing well above the average market growth, which Atwal says confirms the integration of the Packard Bell business is going well.

Hewlett-Packard saw growth across all market segments, with strong performance in consumer mobile PCs.

For the first time since 2005, Dell's retail expansion across EMEA helped the company exhibit growth above 20% for two consecutive quarters.